‘What was lost in the process was the family’
‘Zero tolerance’ policy was flawed from the beginning
When a federal judge ordered the Trump administration to reunify migrant families separated at the border, the government’s cleanup crews faced an immediate problem.
They weren’t sure who the families were, let alone what to call them.
Customs and Border Protection databases had categories for “family units,” and “unaccompanied alien children” who arrive without parents. They did not have a distinct classification for more than 2,600 children who had been stripped away from their families
and placed in government shelters.
So agents came up with a new term: “deleted family units.”
But when they sent that information to the refugee office at the Department of Health and Human Services, which was told to facilitate the reunifications, the office’s database didn’t have a column for such families.
The crucial tool for fixing the problem was crippled. Case workers and government health officials had to sift by hand through the files of all the nearly 12,000 migrant children in HHS custody to figure out which ones had arrived with parents, where the adults were jailed and how to put them back together.
Compounding failures to record, classify and keep track of migrant parents and children pulled apart by President Donald Trump’s “zero-tolerance” border crackdown were at the core of what is now widely regarded as one of the biggest debacles of his presidency. The rapid implementation and sudden reversal of the policy whiplashed multiple federal agencies, forcing the activation of an HHS command center ordinarily used to handle hurricanes and other catastrophes.
After his 30-day deadline to reunite the “deleted” families passed Thursday, U.S. District Court Judge Dana M. Sabraw lambasted the government for its lack of preparation and coordination.
“There were three agencies, and each was like its own stovepipe. Each had its own boss, and they did not communicate,” Sabraw said at a Friday court hearing in San Diego. “What was lost in the process was the family. The parents didn’t know where the children were, and the children didn’t know where the parents were. And the government didn’t know either.”
This account of the separation plan’s implementation and sudden demise is based on court records as well as interviews with more than 20 current and former government officials, advocates and contractors, many of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity to give candid views and diagnose mistakes.
Trump officials have insisted they were not doing anything extraordinary, and were simply upholding the law. The administration saw the separations as a powerful tool to deter illegal border crossings, and did not anticipate the raw emotional backlash from separating thousands of families to prosecute the parents for crossing the border illegally.
Most of those parents were charged with misdemeanors and taken to federal courthouses for mass trials, where they were sentenced to time served. By then their children were already in government shelters. The government did not view the families as a discrete group, nor devise a special plan to reunite them, until Sabraw told them to do so.
One result was that more than 400 parents were deported without their children. Many others say they went weeks without being able to speak to their sons and daughters and, in dozens of cases, signed forms waiving their rights to reclaim their children without understanding what those forms said.
Scrambling to meet the judge’s reunification timeline, government chaperons transported children from shelters scattered across the country to immigration jails near the border where they’d been severed from their parents weeks or months before.
One attorney said Friday that 10 days had passed since her client was told she would be reunited with her 6-year-old daughter. She remained in detention in Texas, and neither she nor a social worker for her daughter, waiting in a New York shelter, could get an explanation. “She watched all the other mothers go out of her dorm. There is only her and
one other left,” said the attorney, Eileen Blessinger.
In court filings Thursday, the government said it had reunited more than 1,800 children with their parents or other guardians. But 711 children would remain separated for now, because their parents had been deported, had criminal records or otherwise had not been cleared to regain custody.
In the end, Trump’s decision to stop separating families, followed by Sabraw’s reunification order, has largely brought a return to the status quo at the border, with hundreds of adults released from custody to await immigration hearings while living with their children in the United States.
Crossings increase
When illegal crossings along the Mexico border jumped this spring to their highest levels since Trump took office, the president fumed, telling aides, “This can’t happen on my watch.” He singled out Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen for blame.
Family units consisting of at least one parent and one child were a growing share of those coming across, typically to turn themselves in and claim asylum, citing drug violence and gang threats in Central America. Border Patrol officials called them “non-impactables,” meaning that the adults knew that arriving with children would probably result in them being released from detention to await immigration hearings that could be
months or years away.
Agents in the field had long clamored for a way to deter those border crossers, believing that some are smugglers and that allowing them to go unpunished invites more lawbreaking. By this spring, according to DHS, a quarter of all illegal border crossers were family groups.
“We truly felt this was something we had to do,” a senior DHS official said. “Enforcing the law for the right reasons is not a bad decision.”
Suddenly, an idea considered too extreme by the Obama administration was back in play, pushed by powerful supporters, including Attorney General Jeff Sessions, Trump policy adviser Stephen Miller and White House Chief of Staff John F. Kelly.
But there were also top officials at DHS and other agencies who warned it could go disastrously wrong.
“Some of us didn’t think it would be good policy. Not because it wouldn’t be effective, but because it doesn’t reflect American values, and because it would bring a huge blowback,” said James Nealon, a former DHS international policy adviser who resigned in February.
The government previously had separated parents on a more limited basis, such as when trafficking was suspected or the relationship to the child was in doubt.
Last year, with no public announcement, the administration piloted a mass-separation system in the El Paso area. When illegal crossings jumped this spring, Trump signed off on a blanket policy for the whole border.
“If you are smuggling a child, then we will prosecute you, and that child will be separated from you as required by law,” Sessions said in a May 7 speech in Arizona. “If you don’t like that, then don’t smuggle children over our border.”
One senior Border Patrol official said they were quietly directed not to refer parents for criminal prosecution if their children were under 5. But scores of toddlers and preschoolers were separated.
As the system ramped up, thousands of children were funneled into shelters overseen by HHS, so many that the agency had to set up a tent camp outside El Paso and plan for additional ones on military bases.
On June 28, two days after Sabraw’s reunification order, DHS officials held a conference call for members of its Homeland Security Advisory Council, a group of security experts and former officials who provide recommendations and counsel to the secretary. One member, David A. Martin, said officials had few answers when dismayed members asked how they planned to bring families back together: “They were saying, “Well, we’re working on it.’” Two weeks later, he and three other members quit in disgust.
Tracking migrants
Well before Trump took office, people inside and outside HHS’s Office of Refugee Resettlement recognized that the custom-built database used since 2014 to track the migrant children in its custody was clunky and flawed.
The Unaccompanied Children Portal crashed often, according to several people with access to it. And because it sometimes failed to save information, caseworkers were trained to copy whatever they were trying to enter about a child into a separate Word document.
Most serious, the portal was not built in a way that allowed ORR to add data categories or quickly sort the information it contains, according to three people familiar with it.
If HHS staff wanted to compile specific information, such as a roster of all the pregnant teenagers at shelters, “It would be months and months,” said a former department official.
Because the system was not designed with an expectation that ORR would need to find the detained parents of its children, the portal did not include a place to type in information about parents’ identity, location or file number.
By 2016, the former official said, then-HHS Secretary Sylvia Mathews Burwell “was frustrated, because, a lot of times we just had to say, ‘We can’t get this data,’ or ‘We can get it, but it will take a couple of weeks.’ “
The department hired a government contractor who made recommendations for upgrading the system and adding more staff. A few improvements were made, but it was near the end of the Obama administration.
‘Zero tolerance’
HHS officials said they participated in White House calls and meetings after “zero tolerance” was announced. But they did not address repeated questions about whether the department was involved in planning the policy.
The department’s refugee office was overwhelmed with the number of children in its custody once the mass separations began. And the files arriving from the Border Patrol were a mess.
The underlying problem, though, was that the problem-ridden database “was not set up to reunite children parents from whom they’d been separated,” said Robert Carey, who was director of ORR for the final two years of the Obama era.
Today, Justice Department officials insist “zero tolerance” remains in force. The agency “continues to prosecute, to the extent practicable, all cases referred to them for prosecution,” said spokesman Devin O’Malley.